Saturday 20 February 2010

The Role of Enterprise Architect Again

It was coincidental with my last post that I was talking on the phone later this same week with Paul Williams of GCS Recruitment, who specialises in architecture appointments in the UK, he told me he had had written in his blog recently how he was frustrated by clients advertising for enterprise architects and then promptly listing a whole list of technical skill requirements.

The role clearly was not what it said on the tin.

I do hope I.T. and HR people are not high-jacking the job title and using it to sound good and dress up senior technical roles else this trend is going to create even more mis-understanding and be quite unhelpful.Particularly in alienating the business people who then will see the title enterprise architect and think it is something quite different to what it should be.

The other issue I have seen is that CIO's and their senior managers go out to recruit enterprise architects and say all the right things about wanting business orientated candidates and call strong business architect type people in for interviews; but then end up selling out, recruiting technical people instead later on in the interviewing process.

This creates much frustration to the business types who were reluctant to get involved in the first place because they new this would happen; but had been reassured by the agent that: " Oh no they really want strong business design people- this isn't a technical role you such a good fit!"

I have always thought that there is a tendency for people to "recruit in their own image".

2 comments:

  1. Jobserve seems to be sending me loads of Enterprise Archtecture job opportunities at the moment but when you read them they neary all have technical requirements.

    This is proving the point that some of us have noticed that the term "Enterprise Architect" is being used as I.T. Enterprise Architecture; the way this seems to be going over the last few months or so is ensuring the term "Enterprise Architect" is going to be ruined!

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  2. Very annoying indeed however the only upside is that if the credibility of enterprise architects is being ruined ,as you say, then the opportunities for us business architects will increase as the I.T. types again blow holes in their own feet!

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